interesting that their hypothesis on levitation is based on the density rather then the mass of an object. Especially since finding objects that are denser then osmium isn't easy. However - finding objects of varying masses is rather simple.

Though her sight was not long, and her weight was not small, Yet her actions were winning, her languaghe was clear, and everyone bowed as she opened the ball, on the arm of some high gaiterd, grim grenadier. Half of Europe admitted the striking success Of the the dances and routes that were given by Brown Bess

.... And if ever we English had reson to bless Any arm save our mother's, that arm is Brown Bess.

Didn't we have that old neutron star lying about round here somewhere? That should be dense enough.

Neutron tide- Arthur C Clerk

"In deference to the next of kin," Commander Cummerbund explained with morbid relish, "the full story of the super-cruiser 'Flatbush's' last mission has never been fully revealed. You know, of course, that she was lost during the war against the Mucoids."

We all shuddered. Even now, the very name of the gelatinous monsters who had come slurping Earthward from the general direction of the Coal Sack aroused vomitive memories.

"I knew her skipper well -- Captain Karl van Rinderpest, hero of the final assault on the unspeakable, but not unshriekable, !!Yeetch."

He paused politely to let us unplug our ears and mop up our spilled drinks.

"'Flatbush' had just launched a salvo of probability inverters against the Mucoid home planet and was heading back toward deep space in formation with three destroyers -- the Russian 'Lieutenant Kizhe', the Israeli 'Chutzpah', and her Majesty's 'Insufferable'. They were still accelerating when a fantastically unlikely accident occurred. 'Flatbush' ran straight into the gravity well of a neutron star."

When our expressions of horror and incredulity had subsided, he continued gravely.

"Yes -- a sphere of ultimately condensed matter, only ten miles across, yet as massive as a sun -- and hence with a surface gravity one hundred billion times that of Earth.

"The other ships were lucky. They only skirted the outer fringe of the field and managed to escape, though their orbits were deflected almost a hundred and eighty degrees. But 'Flatbush', we calculated later, must have passed within a few dozen miles of that unthinkable concentration of mass and so experienced the full violence of its tidal forces.

"Now in any reasonable gravitational field -- even that of a White Dwarf, which may run up to a million Earth g's -- you just swing around the center of attraction and head on out into space again, without feeling a thing. At the closest point you could be accelerating at hundreds or thousands of g's -- but you're still in free fall, so there are no physical effects. Sorry if I'm laboring the obvious, but I realize that everyone here isn't technically orientated."

If this was intended as a crack at Fleet Paymaster General "Sticky Fingers" Geldclutch, he never noticed, being well into his fifth beaker of Martian Joy Juice.

"For a neutron star, however, this is no longer true. Near the center of mass the gravitational gradient -- that is, the rate at which the field changes with distance -- is so enormous that even across the width of a small body like a spaceship there can be a difference of a hundred thousand g's. I need hardly tell you what that sort of field can do to any material object.

"'Flatbush' must have been torn to pieces almost instantly, and the pieces themselves must have flowed like liquid during the few seconds they took to swing around the star. Then the fragments headed on out into space again.

"Months later a radar sweep by the Salvage Corps located some of the debris. I've seen it -- surrealistically shaped lumps of the toughest metals we possess twisted together like taffy. And there was only one item that could even be recognized -- it must have come from some unfortunate engineer's tool kit."

The Commander1s voice dropped almost to inaudibility, and he dashed away a manly tear.

"I really hate to say this." He sighed. "But the only identifiable fragment of the pride of the United States Space Navy was . . . one star-mangled spanner."

I thought I pickled that damn squid last Christmas.....So how do squid reproduce you ask? I shall tell you...

~ WARNING~ This may not be suitable for certain persons with weak hearts, stomachs, ankles or hair folicles. ~

First they usually meet at a sand bar.The Ink Spots tune, 'Don't Get Around Much Anymore' playing on the junk of the sea box- Unless pheromones are involved (squid perfumes), both male and female (or male/male and female/female) probably just bump into each other in the dark. After a moment of panic, sixteen arms and four tentacles entangle and the giants go beak to beak.

The relatively long terminal organ (penis) of a mature male is almost the length of its mantle, from which it projects freely, through the funnel, for a considerable portion of the organ's length. Species with such long organs presumably use them directly to implant spermatophores hydraulically into the female, and as a rule lack modification of either ventral arm (hectocotylus) for spermatophore transfer. Architeuthis lacks a hectocotylus.

His metre+-long penis presumably injects numerous spermatophores directly into the female's arms. The two animals then separate, the male swimming away, probably a bit beat up (possibly having lost parts of his arms and tentacles in the violent struggle, but none the wiser likely repeats this affair with another female (should the opportunity arise). His spermatophores remain embedded in each female's arms - possibly burrowing even deeper into their flesh.

Copulation is likely to accelerate maturity of the female. Eggs soon funnel from her large, terminally positioned ovary into long, convoluted proximal oviducts. From here they advance to the oviducal glands, structures that secrete to the egg chemicals that, amongst other things, initiate sperm activation and attraction. Passing from these glands the eggs would discharge from the distal oviduct, possibly in strings, directly into the female mantle cavity. The nidamental glands would then secrete vast amounts of jelly, probably almost entirely filling her mantle cavity. This jelly binds with discharging eggs, and like a cement mixer, her mantle probably rhythmically contracts and relaxes, thoroughly mixing them. Shortly afterwards this mass of jelly and egg would be extruded through her funnel, and a sphere-like egg mass of ~half-a-metre in diameter would be released. This mass would then be taken into her arms where she would cradle it as it absorbed seawater and increases in size (possibly to two-or-so metres diameter).

The problem has always been how to get the sperm (embedded in the arms) to the eggs (embedded in the jelly/egg mass). One solution is proposed here (but this is guess work). While she cradles this mass in her arms, chemicals released from the jelly activate the spermatophores embedded into her arms. These 10-cm long parasite-like spermatophores then would migrate through her flesh to the arm surface, their ends would rupture and sperm would be discharged directly to the face of the egg mass. Frenzied by the chemical cues given off by the eggs, the sperm migrate through the jelly to individual eggs and fertilisation ensues. The egg mass would then be released by the female and drift away in the current. (The alternative is to having fertilisation occurring within her mantle. This would, however, necessitate either the spermatophores or the sperm to actively migrate from the arms to the mantle cavity. To date no spermatophore has been observed in any of the mantle cavity, proximal or distal oviduct, or oviducal gland of any dissected female. Moreover, it is quite unlikely that individual sperm could travel this distance. Cradling the egg mass in the arms seems the most plausible way for sperm to be exposed to the egg.)

MOST PRECISE MASS CALCULATION FOR LATTICE QCD. A team of theoretical physicists have produced the best prediction of a particle's mass. And within days of their paper being submitted to Physical Review Letters, that very particle's mass was accurately measured at Fermilab, providing striking confirmation of the predicted value. How do the known particles acquire the mass they have? The answer might come from lattice QCD, the name for a computational approach to understanding how quarks interact. Imagine quarks placed at the interstices of a crystal-like structure. Then let the quarks interact with each other via the exchange of gluons along the links between the quarks. The gluons are the designated carriers of the strong nuclear force under the general auspices of the theory called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). From this sort of framework the mass of the known hadrons (quark-containing composite particles such as mesons and baryons) can be calculated. Until recently, however, the calculations were marred by a crude approximation. A big improvement came only in 2003, when uncertainties in mass predictions went from the 10% level to the 2% level (see Davies et al., Physical Review Letters, 16 January 2004). The mass of the proton, for example, could be calculated within a few percent of the actual value. Progress has come from a better treatment of the light quarks and from greater computer power. Together the improvements provide the researchers with a realistic treatment of the "sea quarks," the virtual quarks whose ephemeral presence has a noticeable influence over the "valence" quarks that are considered the nominal constituents of a hadron. A proton, for example, is said to consist of three valence quarks---two up quarks and one down quark---plus a myriad of sea quarks that momentarily pop into existence in pairs. Now, for the first time, the mass of a hadron has been predicted with lattice QCD. Andreas Kronfeld (ask@fnal.gov, 630-840-3753) and his colleagues at Fermilab, Glasgow University, and Ohio State report a mass calculation for the charmed B meson (Bc, for short, consisting of an anti-bottom quark and a charmed quark). The value they predict is 6304 +/- 20 MeV---the remarkable precision stems not only from the improvements discussed above, but also from the researchers' methods for treating heavy quarks. A few days after they submitted their Letter for publication, the first good experimental measurement of the same particle was announced 6287 +/- 5 MeV. This successful confirmation is exciting, because it bolsters confidence that lattice QCD can be used to calculate many other properties of hadrons. (Allison et al., Physical Review Letters,6 May 2005, Lattice QCD website at http://lqcd.fnal.gov/ )

Polarized deep inelastic scattering (DIS) experiments have shown that the quark spins account for only a rather small fraction of the nucleon spin, thus implying an appreciable contribution either from gluon spins or possibly from orbital angular momentum. Competing explanations exist for this result, in which the polarized glue G or the negatively polarized strange quarks lower the quark contribution to the nucleon spin. One way to solve this puzzle is to measure directly by studying, for example, polarized semi-inclusive processes, where the gluons enter in the initial state of the hard scattering sub-processes at lowest order. Since the main hard scattering sub-process in DIS is the virtual photo-absorption ∗q → q (q-event), the measurement of inclusive polarized structure functions, like g1(x), does not allow the separation of the various parton components, and does not give direct access to the spin-dependent gluon distribution.

Thus, with current knowledge we can only begin to appreciate spin-stabilized quark memory arrays.

Well, it just beats me, is al. I can't reckon it nohow. I am glad Gluon has employment as the designated carrier of the strong nuclear force, though, on account of how he's so good at it. Why, when Gluon was just a pup, he'd stop spinning altogether if you threw him some of that nuclear force, and he;d bring it back right off, straight up. Then he'd spin for a while begging for you to throw it again!! He's a nacherl, I'm tellin' ya!

The gluons are the designated carriers of the strong nuclear force under the general auspices of the theory called quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

or

His metre+-long penis presumably injects numerous spermatophores directly into the female's arms. The two animals then separate, the male swimming away, probably a bit beat up (possibly having lost parts of his arms and tentacles in the violent struggle, but none the wiser likely repeats this affair with another female (should the opportunity arise). His spermatophores remain embedded in each female's arms - possibly burrowing even deeper into their flesh.

I rest my case. Choose the one that is charismatic, luring you to you to read it. (This IS supposed to be "BS," not "ZZZzzzzzzz...")

Poor old Gluon. I remember the time he fetched a giant squid. Poor pup was confused for a week. I don't think he ever figgered out what all them tentacles were. He kept bitin' 'em, trying to make 'em lay still. Then he found that meter-long penis, figgered it out, and went off and lay in his box for a month, just as depressed as all git out. That was before physicists and biologists figgered out that squids are really just aberrant, unstable, quark pairs. Since then ol' Gluon's been right frisky.

So how big is Gluon? Or is trying to confine him to a relativly precise size, in a mere three spatial dimensions a really bad idea? We don't want to have to run any more postmen through a probability inversion matrix, like we did last time gloun had one of his funny moods?

His size will change on you if you measure it. We just reckon he's about right. A cross between a neutrino and an Airedale. One vet told us he was too big for his size, but he said that was not unusual for the breed.

And to celebrate Mom's arising, I have a matter for discussion. It fits in the Cafe because yes, it deals with music; but it is quite appropriate here as at its root it is a legal query.

We are all, I assume, familiar with the first verse of that great Irish ballad The Ballad of William Bloat. (If you're not, go look it up in the DT.) If you have momentarily forgotten, here it is:

In a mean abode on the Skankill Road Lived a man named William Bloat; He had a wife, the curse of his life, Who continually got his goat. So one day at dawn, with her nightdress on He cut her bloody throat.

Now, we have this guy who, apparently for what he considered good reasons, murdered his wife. So far, so good. They catch him, he suffers the penalty prescribed by law.

Don't you think that it's pushing the definition of "quirky crime" for him to have attempted her murder while wearing her nightie? I mean, was he trying to cop an insanity plea or something? Or was this how he "got his kicks" -- cross-dressing in lingerie and then offing someone?

So, you think that it was a simple grammatical error? I think not. Songs are proofread. Songs are intentional. No songsmith would write a song with a dangling participle or any other error of grammar or fact; the public simply wouldn't accept it. Just look at such songs as "Purple People Eater" or "The George Bush Blues" or "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer."

I suggest you learn the difference between a dangling participle and a misplaced modifer. A participle is usually in the for "...ing" and represents an action, the ongoing or abstract sense of a verb.

The couplet

So one day at dawn, with her nightdress on He cut her bloody throat.

does not contain a participle, dangling or otherwise, since the only verb is in the past tense. It could be argued that "with her nightdress on" is cognitively identical to "wearing her nightdress", but in grammar it is the form that defines things. One does wonder how her throat got bloody before he cut it, as implied by the second line, but that is just more bad writing. Not grammar, and probably not truth.

Ah! But does the author mean "bloody" in the literal sense or in the vulgar intensive sense? If he were to have said "He cut her fucking throat" would we assume she was in the act of performing fellatio when he stabbed her? And if she was, why didn't he stab the guy to whom she was giving the blowjob as well?

I don't know where the Skankill Road is -- it could as easily be in the UK as in upstate New York. But people in the UK don't use the expression "get his goat" very much, do they? The combination of this with the improper sentence structure leads one to believe the verse is Yank, and therefore "bloody" i s implied literally, rather than vulgarly, but of course that makes no sense at all. Sigh.

One of histories great Lost Causes is trying to make sense out of something that is inherently non-sensical.

Geez, I knew it was more complicated than I thought. Now we got a guy who's wearing his wife's pajamas cutting her already cut throat!

Maybe she committed suicide when she caught him wearing her things and he was just making sure or something.

I suspect he had very deeply seated relationship problems with women. Wearing her clothing demonstrates clearly that he wanted to be like her (and, by extension, to be part of the Universal Feminine), yet when he found her dead by her own hand he symbolically killed her again -- an obvious attempt to deny his feminine side by "killing" that which symbolized it to him. I would not, however, overlook the possibility that he simply didn't like her taste in nighties and killing her again was his way of showing it.

Well, I think poor Mr Bloat was framed. It was the goat that did it. It plainly says that the wife "continually got his goat".

The poor goat was just worn out from being gotten all the time. So the goat gored the bitch in the throat to get some relief from being continually gotten, and then Bloat sliced her already bleeding throat to cover up the evidence of the goring because he really loved the goat and didn't want him to get in trouble.

Amos, I didn't say that the problem was a dangling participle, I only sent Rapaire off in search of one with the inference that the poem's problem was bad grammar, as is the case with dangling participles.

My participle used to dangle, but I got this email from a pharmacy in Western Swamiland that said I could get this drug, I think it was called "Vigaro" or something, that would firm it right up. They needed the numbers of my bank accounts and my passwords to verify that my credit was good and my credit card numbers and stuff so I could pay for the stuff.

Pretty soon I'll never have a dangling participle again and that will make me popular with women and the envy of men. And it's not habit forming or anything like that.

The email also said that it would "add four inches" but I'm not at all interested in being six-six. I'd have to buy all new pants, for one thing.

What have we been talking about here in the MOAB that has MUSIc Google links turning up? It's actually offering Burl Ives Songs and Free Song Downloads (though look out for that one--it has nasty popups and is one of those take-over-the-computer sites).

I never seem to get good ads. today I'm seeing a lot of insurance - expecially "Senior Insurance" and "That Rapperis no good". No the second ad is a definate truism; but I resent the ad for "senior" insurance. Damn AARP keeps sending me flyers too!

Has anyone seen a Ralf recently, or a Fred that would know where to find one? I have a freind pining despratly for her Ralf, and maybe a subsitute would stop her moaning. Very pretty, no trouble at all....